SIEV-X revisited

10 July 2002 — 10:00am

Webdiarist James Woodcock writes: "There seems to be a third group of Webdiarists who do not give a flying fig either way! Cheryl had her 15 minutes of fame and we all talked about it for another 7 1/2. Now lets get back to unthrown children, anti terrorist laws, the third way, missing boats, economic rationalism and what Senators do on the Senate floor, not in their bedrooms."

Yes, yes, I agree, but professional introspection on Cheryl takes its toll! First some SIEV-X, then a John Wojdylo piece on the state we're in.

The SIEV-X inquiry resumes tomorrow with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, the commanding officer of defence force intelligence, the federal police and the spooks at the immigration department in the dock.

The defence force SIEV-X submission, finally released on Monday, was a big disappointment. Apart from the maps I've already put up, we got a scanty 'declassifed intelligence summary' which told us less than previous evidence, apart from a couple of defence force intelligence summaries - one right and ignored, one wrong and acted upon (in the sense of doing nothing, as always).

The summary of surveillance is basically the same as Hill's briefing to The Australian (see Waiting game on SIEV-X).

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There's no discussion of why defence took no special action to find SIEV-X or of its decision-making processes. It's hard to understand why Defence Minister Robert Hill's covering letter claims the submission "will be of use to the committee in rejecting the spurious allegations that the Australian Defence Force turned a blind eye to the plight of this vessel." Eye of the beholder, I guess - to me it proves the opposite. Still, it's nice to see the increasingly unsubtle Hill telling the inquiry what to think. He's almost as unsubtle as his chief-of-staff Matt Brown, who last week asked the inquiry secretariat to fix an error in the submission so "the nutters" who didn't believe the defence force was squeaky clean on SIEV-X wouldn't get ideas.

Keep it coming guys - sneering arrogance is a suitably stupid weapon to convince people of the merits of your point of view.

We've put the defence force SIEV-X submission and Admiral Geoffrey Smith's famous May 22 retraction letter to the inquiry in the right-hand column of Webdiary.

Here's my preview piece on the submission which appeared in Saturday's Herald.

Navy warned that doomed boat was overdue

By Margo Kingston

While survivors of an asylum-seeker vessel were in the water hoping for rescue, the Australian Defence Force was warned by its own intelligence unit that the boat was behind schedule, but failed to actively search for it.

The Defence Force intelligence assessment suggested that the doomed boat would be delayed and not arrive as expected in Christmas Island the next day, a submission to the Senate reveals. The boat sank with the death of 353 people, including 150 children during last year's federal election campaign.

The Defence Force's Northern Command (NORCOM) intelligence summary on October 20 said SIEV-X's progress would be delayed because it was overcrowded and needed to maintain stability, the submission reveals. A slow passage was therefore likely, the intelligence assessment had said.

The Herald has obtained information from the Defence Force's submission on SIEV-X to the senate children overboard inquiry ahead of its release on Monday.

The revelation contradicts claims by Admiral Geoffrey Smith, the head of the border protection operation, Operation Relex, that intelligence reports at the time merely reported "alleged departures" and were not firm enough to require action.

The submission shows that Admiral Smith also did nothing to search for SIEV-X two days later on October 22, when Coastwatch again confirmed SIEV-X's departure and issued an "overdue alert". He appears to have relied instead on a NORCOM intelligence assessment that the vessel had returned to Java because of unfavourable weather and overcrowding.

The Herald has been told there is no explanation for NORCOM"s assessment, which contradicts a personal warning from a concerned Australian Federal Police officer in Indonesia that morning that SIEV-X was overdue and very overcrowded.

Admiral Smith never deviated from his refusal to actively search for SIEV-X on October 18, when AFP intelligence reported its departure and other intelligence reported that it could be in poor condition and need rescue at sea. He is expected to be closely questioned on this decision when recalled to give evidence.

The ADF is believed to have told the Prime Minister's people smuggling task force - beginning on October 18 - that it was searching for SIEV-X in accordance with its standard practice on the receipt of reliable intelligence reports on departures.

In a covering letter to the children overboard inquiry, the defence minister, Robert Hill, insisted that the submission torpedoed allegations that the ADF had turned a blind eye to the plight of SIEV-X. But the surveillance maps attached to the submission show the navy never altered its routine surveillance to search for SIEV-X.

The Defence submission denies suggestions that because the boat was overcrowded on its departure the ADF was duty-bound to begin a search and rescue mission when Coastwatch assessed it was overdue. Defence's reasoning was that it believed SIEV (suspected illegal entry vessel) crews had previously displayed a reasonable level of maritime proficiency.

And Senator Hill has still not given permission for the head of the defence force task force set up to assist the inquiry, Admiral Raydon Gates, to give evidence about the submission and his review of all intelligence reports received by Operation Relex before and after SIEV-X sank.

***

Sentenced to the Psychiatric Hospital

By John Wojdylo

In June last year, a woman I know very well was taken to hospital because she was anaemic. She thought she was only going in for a few days. But the days, and then the weeks, went by, and the doctors would not let her go home, even long after her strength had returned, even though she said she wanted to. She tried to explain that with a bit of help, she was quite capable of taking care of herself. But they didn't believe her. They kept her there against her will.

She began to believe this was for a sinister reason - that she was effectively being imprisoned. But what was the reason? A list of motives went through her mind. She did not have the social graces to keep these suspicions to herself - after a lifetime of dispossession (she had lost everything three times in her life), she was unable to muster trust of authority anymore. And - as is typical with writers - she had always been a bit eccentric: you'd have to know her well to see how sharp she was, and that she was actually taking the piss out of you. She had very few friends, and lived alone for virtually 30 years, keeping her kind of integrity utterly uncompromised.

She caused embarrassing scenes at the hospital. Eventually the medical staff - at the initiative of an aged care worker - declared that she was not of sound mind, and incapable of making her own decisions. The objective, medical decision was legally binding.

Yet none of the people who judged her had spoken to her. That's because they don't know her language. They only reacted to how she was acting, and the three or four words they understood - and these, admittedly, sounded pretty odd. They acted purely upon observation, not once engaging with her, to find out her point of view, to see what sense she could make, to see if there was, after all, logic in her actions.

How ironic that this threat, accompanied by incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, was precisely what sane people faced under decades of communist rule in the Eastern bloc. It was the fate of Varlam Shalamov before his death in 1982, whose writing had inspired Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago". And how ironic that it would be in free Australia where it finally caught up with some of them.

Her health went downhill very fast after that. She lost the will not to compromise, and gave herself up to the constant presence of others. I hear she sleeps most of the time now, and barely ever says anything to anyone.

If I had to pick out the current of our society that has made the deepest impression on me in these last 12 months or so, it'd be the following.

After offering our help to people, or putting down our guard and opening ourselves up to them - after exposing our vulnerability - if we feel we've been tricked by them; or that they have acted dishonestly in any way in getting our attention, irrespective of the circumstances; or if we decide that they somehow deserve their fate because of their past misdeeds; or that they are "pathetic" and therefore bring their fate upon themselves; then these people will cease to exist in our eyes, even if the lives of hundreds of them are put at risk in treacherous seas by circumstances beyond their control.

Instead of addressing their words - what seem to be completely plausible reasons they give for their actions - we ignore those people absolutely, and retreat into our space, into selfish concern for our own peace of mind, or into pursuing our own naked ambition, to profit from misfortune. By ignoring their side of the story, in not making the effort to compare their version to the known facts, we deny the process of exposing a possible lie - empty circumstantial evidence contributes nothing to the truth - and we must thereafter live with half-baked suspicions, sooner or later, depending on how weak we are, succumbing to our prejudices.

We fan the sparks of prejudice and populism into wildfires that cause untold misery to the innocent and enslave us all. We condemn our society to being one great lunatic asylum, where individuals at all levels - especially teenagers and young adults - are absolutely disempowered, feeling they do not and cannot exist in a society that won't grant them the basic dignity of at least acknowledging their presence.

The assertion that the recent hysteria was just about two politicians and their families (or the "integrity of the political system") would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.

It's astounding how easily we dismiss the existence of others; and that this could even be so, in Australia in the 21st century, because we are a deeply puritanical people.